This time I’m doing “No-Beer November”. I generally don’t drink tea or coffee and the cupboards are usually stocked with Pepsi Max, which is too fizzy. How anyone can drink that rubbish is beyond me!

I noticed recently, however, that I would happily drink 2-3 cans of lager 3-4 nights a week mainly because it was there and, as mentioned earlier, I don’t ‘do’ tea, coffee or Pepsi Max. There were no plans to get drunk, nor did I even get drunk, on such a regular basis; I didn’t (and still don’t) class myself as being alcohol dependent or an alcoholic.

So why am I forcing myself to not drink beer for a month? I suppose a part of it is to prove the above point – that I don’t need beer to get me through half of the week. However, if I’m honest, the main reasons are that Wii Fit told me I was overweight and both Mini-MaFt and Mrs-MaFt told me I have a fat belly. It turns out I am vain afterall!

So, wish me luck – I look forward to losing a few lb’s and gaining a few £’s too.

NB – there is one pre-planned day off later in the month for the PocketGPSWorld.com Christmas Bash. It’s not a failure if it is pre-planned!

Now, I’m not going to post my results here because there is one close family member who doesn’t want to know plus you’re probably not that interested anyway! But in the days before getting my results it got me thinking…

What if I DO have the gene defect…? Well, for one thing it would mean I would have an 80% chance of getting bowel cancer between age 40 and 60. It would also mean I could be put onto a screening program where every year or two years I would have a camera shoved up my back-passage to look for any signs of tumours. So while the risk of cancer would be dramatically increased, the risk of coming to any harm from it would be equally reduced owing to the screening process that I would be entitled to.

What if I DON’T have the gene defect…? Life would basically continue as normal. I would not have an increased risk of bowel cancer. I would be just like every other person, taking the same day-to-day risks and having the same risk of getting bowel cancer as everyone else. I could still get bowel cancer though, but it may not be known about until it’s too late as I wouldn’t be on a screening programme.

So,would it be better to have the gene defect? While the likelihood of getting bowel cancer is increased, there is a much better likely outcome if it did occur as it would be spotted early on. Or is it better to not have it to avoid having to worry about ‘when’ I may get bowel cancer?

Regardless of the outcome there is nothing I can do to change my genes, I guess the real issue will be how I will handle the knowledge I now have and how it may or may not affect myself and the people around me… If my brothers get a different result to me will there be any form of ‘jealousy’ between us? Would *I* be jealous of those with different results? Thinking of it this way makes me realise perhaps just why the ‘close family member’ may not want to know the results!

Well, as the title suggests, working at home this way has it’s pro’s and it’s con’s…

The Pro’s

Mrs-MaFt works shifts so child-care is relatively easy. If she’s working then I do the school/nursery runs and catch up on my work later in the evening once it’s passed bed o’clock for the kids.

If I’m not too well I can still get work done without worrying about infecting my fellow co-workers with the lergy. With an office job I would lose a whole day even if I would have been well enough to get some work done.

I could come to work hungover and no one would know.

I could come to work naked and no one would know.

I could come to work naked and hungover and no one would know.

If I lie in (unlikely, I have kids!) it takes me 12 seconds to commute down the stairs and open my laptop.

I can nip out to the local Farm Shop, Morrisons or Town during the day and miss the busy times.

I can listen to punk rock and metal all day long instead of the awful pop ‘music’ pumped out by Radio 1 and Galaxy (the requisite ‘entertainment’ in all the non-home jobs I’ve had)

Courier deliveries result in actually having your item when they deliver it rather than having until the weekend and then driving a 15 mile round trip to pick it up from the depot.

The Cons

It can be all too easy to waste too many hours dicking about on eBay or doing too much research on a gadget I simply can’t afford to buy.

People assume that, because you’re at home, you’re not busy and can jump to their every whim.

No ‘snow days’.

It can get quite lonely at times. A lazy, fluffy black cat and a handful of cyber-colleagues on instant messenger software just doesn’t match real, actual physical company.

On a morning if I have Mini-Mrs-MaFt then, generally, she will be watching CBeebies. That itself isn’t a bad thing – it keeps her entertained and she practises her dancing when there’s some music on. However, as pointed out by ‘Mrs TheBoyAndMe‘, it usually results in having “please tell me, please tell me, pleeeease teeeeell meeee your name” stuck in your head for too many hours.

It’s too easy to get lazy. Sometimes after Mrs-MaFt has taken Mini-Mrs-MaFt I can’t be bothered switching from CBeebies to Kerrang! Radio on the tellybox.

In Conclusion

Working at home has it’s pro’s and it has it’s cons. However, I wouldn’t change it for anything! Following various people on twitter and general day to day dealings with other real people it would seem I am in a minority – you see, I actually enjoy my job and the work I do. I work with some great people spread out about the world in various different time-zones yet still get time with my family. A lot of jobs can’t offer that flexibility – if I had to commute more than a staircase away then that would, straight away, remove 2 hours of available time from the day. And I’d like to keep those those 2 hours, thanks!

Postscript:

Well, in case you were wondering what brought this post about, it was the result of a brief conversation on twitter with @TheBoyAndMe. Click the image to the left to see the whole thing. It’s a quite tenuous link once you actually read it, but that’s what made me think of writing the post! Having CBeebies songs in your head is definitely a ‘con’ of working at home!

More to the point, do I actually LOOK like someone who lives off of cat food and sweets?

So Monday and Tuesday of this week have been spent juggling work, phoning the police, phoning insurance companies, phoning and emailing O2 and getting used to my T-Mobile G2 Touch as a temporary measure. Today is Mrs-MaFt’s birthday and if she doesn;t like the Happy Meal toy I’ve bought her then I reckon things can only get worse…!

Armed with my iPhone, a couple of goodies (you can leave items for other geocachers in some of the larger caches or do swaps for items already in the box) and a thick coat (it was blowing a gale, but at least the rain had stopped); me and Mini-MaFt headed out across the field towards our local alpacca farm for our first ever cache.

Thankfully this one was relatively easy to find so it was a nice start to what could potentially become a time-consuming hobby! The caches was a clip-lid box with a few goodies in it and a notepad/pencil to record our find. Mini-MaFt got a sliding puzzle from here which he swapped for a toy bear he had brought with him. I logged the find on the geocaching website via the iPhone app and we decided to try and find more ‘treasure’.

A bit of a walk through some more fields back to a road I drive on most days a week. Following the clue took me to a wall where we were looking for a ‘micro-cache’ – i.e. something far smaller and with no room for swaps. This one took a lot longer to find mainly due to the fact that there was a car parked right by it!! I did feel a bit dodgy though routing around next to someone’s car but I figured with iPhone app in hand and son in tow it would be proof enough that I wasn’t doing anything dodgy! I found it in the end though, added our details and fired up the app to see which one to go to next!

Our next cache involved a short walk along a narrow road – thankfully with Mini-MaFt in tow there was a path! Although as we were pretty exposed it was hard not to be blown off the path and into the road! Down a short public footpath through a field with a fantastic view (I love living in Thornton!) and we got to our destination. This time I missed it and it was Mini-MaFt who located the ‘treasure’. Again, this one was a box with a lid so room for some swaps. Mini-MaFt got another little toy which we exchanged for a Pocket GPS World keyring and business card. While we were filling out the log book Mini-MaFt spotted a nasty pirate trying to find our treasure; technically he was a farmer checking a bit of fence that had been wind-damaged but that’s not so much fun to a 4 year old! We quickly hopped over the stile and sat on the other side to get the cache all packed away safely without it being seen.

By this point our hands were numb and the next nearest cache was half a mile away down a steep hill going away from home. So we headed home to warm up, waited for Mrs-MaFt to get home and then let Mini-MaFt let-rip telling her all about the treasure hunt! He was still talking about it on his way to bed later on too. I can see this becoming a new hobby and maybe soon we will place our own cache for you all to find!

We were running a bit late yesterday morning so I used the TomTom on the way down as it was easier to set up quickly – I couldn’t find my iPhone holder and charger right there and then! For the return journey, however, I planned on using a mixture of Sygic, CoPilot and iGO to get us home safely. First up was CoPilot which loaded nice and quickly but then seemed to crash on the main menu along with a bit of a graphical glitch. No problems I thought, kill the app and start it up again! Then the fun began, CoPilot decided to hang on the splash screen and just would not load. Next up I tried iGO which, too, hung on the splash screen – not the best of starts… Finally I gave Sygic a shot, fearing the worst and preparing the TomTom for a return trip. My fears were not compounded as Sygic started up and ran with no issues. Later on I gave iGO another shot and it was fine but then when I tried CoPilot it still hung on the splash screen. I actually think the initial problem with iGO was due to memory issues as I tried loading it as soon as CoPilot had crashed out on me.

Anyway, my point being, had I only had CoPilot with me I would have been rather stuck. The only way to reinstall it is to remove it from the iPhone then reinstall it via iTunes on the PC – now, if I had been away for a week or two and that happened…! Thankfully today I had a back up (I actually considered taking only the iPhone). I find I have started to rely on technology a little too much and I may have to dig out my old paper map as a contingency plan – if one of my actual satnav’s packed in while dodging camper vans through the hills around St Ives I doubt my homing instinct would serve us particularly well!

It’s one thing that has really bugged me on Facebook, the difficulty in finding someone, even someone you know! Numerous time I chatted to people via MSN Messenger or on the phone saying if they were on Facebook they could see the photo’s I just uploaded – it usually turns out they are and the conversation then resorts to discussing which keywords to use to try and find each other as more often than not there are 16,000 people with the same name and it’s hard to recognise someone on a tiny profile picture, that is assuming it’s even a picture of them!

So now, Facebook have finally caught up with the times and allow facebook.com/your.name style URL’s – only 3 years too late…! Maybe soon they will get rid of all the crap and it will just be Twitter with photo albums!

Been stupidly busy sorting out poorly kids and poorly me as well as trying to get stuff sorted for the Christmas play I stupidly agreed to do…

I’ve been pretty busy with work stuff to – lots to do with PocketGPSWorld.com as usual but I’ve also recently finished the Migrant Workers Information Bradford site as well as completely redesigning the Jalapeno Drums site. The Jalapeno one is still showing the old site while we wait for domain names to be switched between hosts etc etc – all great fun…! I’ve also updated the portfolio part of my site at MaFt.co.uk/design so it’s not been a total loss!

That’ll do for now, I’ll try post more in the near future!

MaFt

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Now playing: Bowling For Soup – I’m Gay
via FoxyTunes